Up next

Broadcasts

Girl on a Wire: Women and Social Media

Girl on a Wire: Women and Social Media

Watch

The problem of verbal and emotional violence against women online remains insufficiently – or often, mistakenly – addressed. Headlines about online harassment continue to focus on victims rather than perpetrators, while platforms like Twitter and Facebook struggle to define and act upon the difference between free speech and abuse.

But there’s also the upside: social media’s potential for women who are seeking to mark out a space of debate, discussion and disagreement. Largely unmediated, social platforms offer the promise (if not always the purest realisation) of ideas being able to speak for themselves. Women are able to connect with each other, and with their publics, in ways that transcend the ‘motherhood penalty’ and other gendered factors of the traditional workplace.

Jane Gilmore, Rebecca Shaw, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Lucy Valentine are writers who put their words, beliefs and opinions on social media – with the intention of connecting, challenging others and pursuing change. With host Sophie Black, they talk about #writingwhilefemale. How do women participate in digital discussion? How do they end up in arguments, decide when to continue them … and what do they do when argument becomes abuse? And, in this odd amalgam of public and private space, how do women edit their own balance of the political and personal?

Who?

Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a mechanical engineer, social advocate, writer and petrol head, and is the 2015 Queensland Young Australian of the Year. She advocates for the empowerment of youth, women and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Born in Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and her family arrived in Australia when she was two. Since then, she has devoted her extraordinary energy and talents to making Australia a better place. At age 16, Yassmin founded Youth Without Borders, an organisation that enables young people to work together to implement positive change within their communities and internationally.

Jane Gilmore is a freelance journalist, with a strong focus on data journalism and male violence. She was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune, and now writes regularly for the Sydney Morning Herald. She has been published by the Guardian, Meanjin, the Age, the Saturday Paper, News.com.au and Junkee, among many others.

Sophie Black is Head of Publishing at the Wheeler Centre where she has worked on projects such as the new national writers scheme The Next Chapter, The Messenger podcast (Grand Trophy and two Gold Medals, New York Festivals Radio Awards 2017; UNAA Media Award for Best Radio Documentary; Walkley Award for Radio/Audio Feature; Australian Human Rights Commission Media Award) and the ABC Radio National program Talkfest.

Rebecca Shaw (aka brocklesnitch) is a writer and creator of the parody Twitter account @NoToFeminism, which was developed into an illustrated book. She was on the writing team at Tonightly with Tom Ballard and has written for Hard Quiz and Get Krack!n. She was a writer for the Backburner and deputy editor at SBS Comedy. She’s a Contributing Editor at Kill Your Darlings and has written for the Guardian, Pedestrian, Junkee, Ten Daily and most other places you can think of. In 2018 a song she co-wrote won the 2018 ARIA for best comedy release.